1991

The year in Chicago history via the pages of the Reader

The Reader on the war

We are apprehensive that because this war was so successfully prosecuted on the battlefield, the virtual control that your department exercised over the American press will become a model for the future. —Washington bureau chiefs meekly fretting to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney after the Gulf war, quoted in my Hot Type column, August 1, 1991

As America went to war in early 1991 to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, Reader cartoonists weighed in.

Chronicles
of Chicagoans in bars

Search for Nightlife was a recurring feature that showed up in the Reader in 1991 and disappeared in 1992. Toni Schlesinger talked to people in bars and Tom Bechtell Bachtell drew them. It was all pretty impressionistic. Here's how one installment began:

Paris, 1122 W. Montrose: Aimee, the love reporter, who travels all over the globe gathering stories of the human heart, had asked her friend Ann to take her to Paris, one of Ann's former haunts. Aimee and Ann used to work together before Aimee became an internationally famous love reporter. Aimee chose a raspberry silk Gigli jacket from her magnificent wardrobe, thinking Paris would be full of women in glamorous evening gowns dancing in the arms of women in severely tailored pants to the music of Central European violins. But Aimee sees too much Masterpiece Theatre, which clouds her thinking . . .

When Schlesinger and Bechtell Bachtellwere done, so was Search for Nightlife. Their sensibility had been everything.